Help with a meeting

01

Your camera or microphone will not start

The browser blocked it

This is by far the most common cause, and every browser puts the switch in its address bar.

Chrome and Edge — click the camera or the tune icon at the right-hand end of the address bar, choose to allow the camera and microphone, then reload. Firefox — click the camera or microphone icon just left of the address, and clear the blocked entry. Safari — Safari › Settings for This Website, then set Camera and Microphone to Allow.

A browser will only ever hand a camera to a page served over HTTPS, so if you reached the meeting over plain HTTP nothing will work and nothing will explain why. Ask whoever runs the server for the https:// address.

Another program is using the camera

Most cameras can only be held by one program at a time, and the second one to ask simply fails. Quit any other conferencing app, and on Windows check for a background app that opened the camera and never let go. On macOS a camera in use shows a green light next to it — if that light is on and it is not us, something else has it.

The operating system blocked it

macOS — System Settings › Privacy & Security › Camera (and Microphone), and make sure your browser is switched on. A change here needs the browser restarted, not just the tab reloaded. Windows — Settings › Privacy & security › Camera, and check both "Camera access" and the per-app list below it.

There is no camera

A desktop with no webcam reports a missing device rather than a refusal, and there is nothing to fix. Join with audio; nothing else about the meeting changes, and your audio is still recorded to its own track.

02

The recording indicator

If a meeting is being recorded, every person in it sees an indicator saying so. That indicator is not drawn by a setting somebody could forget to turn on — it comes from the server's own grant to the recorder, which is the same grant that lets the recorder subscribe at all. The room cannot be recorded without it lighting up.

You will not see the recorder in the participant grid. It has no camera and no microphone, it can only subscribe, and it takes up no tile. Its presence is reported by the indicator instead, which is a better signal than a phantom participant with a name like "Notetaker".

What is recorded

Each person's audio and video, as separate files, one per track — never mixed together. Beside them a manifest records which account each track belongs to, so the recording says who spoke rather than leaving it to be guessed later.

If your operator enabled transcription, the audio is turned into text on hardware they nominated. If they also enabled summaries, the text of that transcript — never the audio, never the video — is sent to the model provider they configured. Ask them which of those is switched on; both are optional and the meeting works without either.

Where the recording is kept, and for how long, is the operator's decision and not something this software decides for them. Many instances put that sentence on the in-call banner.

A meeting that is not recorded at all

Some rooms are sealed: end-to-end encrypted, with recording structurally impossible rather than merely switched off. A sealed room says so in the same place a recorded one does. If you need a conversation that leaves nothing behind, that is what to ask your operator for.

03

You cannot get into the room

"No such room" — a link that does not match a room is refused rather than quietly redirected somewhere else. That is deliberate: a typo in a link should say so instead of dropping you into the wrong meeting. Check the link.

You are asked to sign in again — sessions are gated by your organisation's identity provider, not by a password this software holds. If sign-in loops, it is that provider to look at.

A guest invite will not open — invites are signed and expire. An expired one cannot be revived; ask for a fresh link.

The meeting server did not answer — this means the call never connected, as opposed to connecting and dropping. It is usually a restart, and usually over in a moment. Some networks block the UDP that carries media; there is a TCP fallback, but a network that blocks both cannot carry a call.

04

Still stuck

Whoever runs your instance can see far more than you can. There is a Diagnostics page in the app that reports whether the recorder, the transcriber, the mail path and the summariser are each answering right now — that is the thing to point them at, because it answers "is it working?" before the meeting rather than after it.

This page describes the software. It is not the support desk for any particular instance — for that, ask the people who run yours. If you are the people who run yours, the installation and operations guide is the other half of this page.